glory (1998)  butterfly woman
By Maureen Kwiat Meshenberg

 

When a shift in your life comes as a final ending, a closing of what you thought was a life constant, it may feel like it’s breaking you in two but it eventually completes you with a new beginning.

Nothing remains constant but as the bridge of my world dissolved behind me, unknown steps appeared into my new journey making me feel empty and full at the same time.

Endings touch beginnings. There is a constant cycle of change and impermanence in our lives. Sometimes as they touch, they embrace unequivocal passion and desire for what lies ahead. Sometimes it feels like complete abandonment of what was once your world, bringing you into a paralyzed state of fear, staring at your beginning like looking into your darkest void.

All that holds us and splits the seconds we live, cracking and dividing our world as it exists in this moment, now shifts into uncharted territories.

One type of ending—an ending that has become common placed in the world, an ending being seen as an ordinary shift because of its frequency—is divorce. It is far from being ordinary or common. This ending is one of betrayal. It comes uninvited, ripping apart the two worlds that once collided into love. An ending that brought me to the precipice of deep denial, clinging to the thought of eternal love that I thought was my constant. I thought I would become a widow first.

In a sense, it would have brought closure, a feeling that our love extends past this life’s existence. I felt myself break open, spilling out completely emptied. I felt void of feeling, numb and dazed at the same time. The words he spoke to me, “I no longer love you,” fell on my shattered heart. Tears poured through and out from me, like waves crashing against my being, heaving sobs upon my aching soul.

My soul was brought to a raw place of vulnerability and emotions I did not know existed in me. It also brought my soul to a heightened consciousness; it brought me to my breakthrough. I didn’t see it at that time 4 years ago, but it was a new beginning in front of me. What fell away, pieces of me were pieces of an untruthful reality. I thought these pieces should remain; trying to pick them up and gather them to my heart.

Pieces like a shell, cracking and breaking away to allow wings to poke through to find my flight back to me.

What comes from nothing is often everything and what we think is everything becomes nothing compared to what comes ahead. When I thought I was losing everything, becoming a vast nothingness to me, I was actually being brought to my everything. I began to write and journal as I did in my teens and in my twenties. I became a prolific poet, words flowing from my soul to pen to paper. What I thought was my true life dissolved and light found its way to me, bringing me out of my dark. Coming to this conscious state of seeing brought me back to the truth of me. Inspiration now stirs deep inside of me. The cycles of change remain, but now I have come to a place of knowing and embracing me.

Had I not gone through this immense shift, I may have never found the true me. There are times I still feel like I am staring into a dark void, I am just willing to jump across it now to the other side of me.

 

Maureen Kwiat MeshenbergMaureen Kwiat Meshenberg is an author and a prolific poetess, guided by her inner soul’s journey and musings about life. She draws from her human experiences, bringing reflective soulful thoughts of the heart. Her most recent work includes her own Facebook page called Heart’s Calling where she currently reaches 3,000 regular readers. She also writes for Journey at the Heart Blog, Women’s Spiritual Poetry from which seven of her poems were selected to be published in an August 2014 Anthology of poetesses called: Journey of The Heart: An Anthology of Spiritual Poetry by Women.  Her debut book Seasons of the Soul:Transitions and Shifts of Life was released on November 7th 2014. She has also have been published in the Tiferet Journal. She has 3 amazing children Alex, Dylan and Jonah and resides in Oak Park, Illinois. Be sure to check out her website

 

Photo: torbakhopper/Flickr

Editor: Marcee Murray King

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